Don Pendleton: Rolling Thunder

“How goes it, Xavier?” Rigo called out to the man closest to her.

“Slow,” called back Xavier Golato, a tall, broad-shouldered man with massive arms and a shaved head glistening with perspiration. “But we are making good progress.”

“We’ll have one of the trees down by sunset,” Rigo told him. “I want to be able to cut the trunk into sections and use it for a ramp.”

“We will be ready,” Golato assured the woman. “You’ll be able to lay the trunks below the waterline like you wanted.”

“Excellent.”

Golato took in Angelica’s voluptuous figure with a faintly salacious gaze. “I have a trunk of my own waiting for you later tonight,” he whispered suggestively.

Angelica returned Golato’s gaze with one every bit as lecherous. “Just be careful not to cut it into sections first,” she taunted. “I’ll be wanting all of it.”

The lovers’ suggestive banter was interrupted when they saw several of the men stop their shoveling and glance upstream to a fork in the river. Rigo followed their gaze and saw a boat entering the lagoon. Instinctively she reached for the 9 mm Walther pistol holstered on her right hip. She relaxed her grip, however, when she recognized the craft, a small, weathered fishing boat propelled by a pair of outboard motors. There were several men on the deck. One of them waved a greeting as the boat drew closer.

“Looks like they brought company,” Golato murmured.

Rigo nodded, eyes on a man’s body sprawled out across the foredeck. A few feet from the body was a woman, gagged and bound at the wrists and ankles. Even from this distance, Rigo could see that the woman was terrified. She could also see that the woman, like the dead man, was white.

“Americans?” Angelica called out to the man who had waved to her from aboard the boat.

The other man nodded. “We came across them a quarter-mile upriver,” he replied, pointing to a small red kayak lying on the deck near the captive woman. “They were acting suspicious.”

Rigo told Golato to have the shovelers stop their work and help guide the boat to a suitable mooring spot ten yards from the section of embankment they had been excavating. After pausing to light another cigarette, she flipped open her cell phone and tried to get in touch with her brothers. Miguel and Jacque Rigo were a few hundred miles away in Bilbao, carrying out the other part of the mission. Neither of them responded. Rigo checked her watch again and frowned. She was supposed to have heard from Miguel ten minutes ago. Had something gone wrong?

Fighting back her concern, she put the phone away and strode along the bank to where the boat was being tethered. Once she’d leaped aboard, she took a closer look at the dead man and saw that he’d been shot once in the head at close range.

“He said they were just tourists, but they have sophisticated camera and radio equipment,” the captain of the boat told her, staring down at the corpse. “They were armed, too.”

Rigo looked from the body to the other woman. The prisoner eyed her beseechingly, tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked to be in her late twenties, blond haired with a sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks. She tried to say something, but her words were muffled by the gag.

“I’ll get to you in a moment,” Rigo told her in flawless English.

Then, shifting back to her native tongue, she asked the boat’s captain, “What did the sonar come up with, Enrique?”

“The readings were all good,” the captain responded. “The depth is acceptable all the way up to Catalia, and there are only a few areas where there are obstacles on the river bottom, but we should be able to maneuver around them.”

The woman smiled flatly. It was nice to have some good news for a change. Of course, Enrique had also brought back a problem with him. He knew it, too, and was quick to anticipate Rigo’s concerns. Gesturing at the woman prisoner, he said, “After I shot the other one, I told her that she would have one last chance to tell the truth once we got here. She knows she will be next if she doesn’t cooperate.”

Rigo nodded and unholstered her Walther. She stepped over the body and crouched before the other woman, eyeing her calmly as she reached for her gag.

“I’m going to take this off,” Rigo explained calmly, “then you will quietly tell us the truth, yes?”

The other woman nodded fearfully. Slowly the gag was unfastened. The prisoner gasped for air, then began to sob.

“We didn’t do anything!” she insisted. “I swear it! We’re working on a film, and we were just getting some second-unit footage of the river! That’s all we were doing! You have to believe me!”

Some of the other men on the boat brought over a crate filled with two handguns, as well as several high-priced film cameras, tape recorders and a slew of accessories. Rigo inspected the guns first. They were both small, standardized Ruger P-4 .22s. Neither had been fired. Rigo set the guns aside and picked up a telephoto lens, then looked back at the other woman.

“CIA?” she asked. “Or NATO maybe?”

“We aren’t spies!” the blonde pleaded. “I’m telling you, we’re just working on a film. A documentary about the Avignon River. We only had guns to warn off wild game whenever we came ashore. We weren’t doing anything wrong!”

Rigo ignored the outburst and looked through the crate, inspecting the woman’s passport, as well as the one taken off the corpse. Both documents seemed on the level, but Rigo knew that meant nothing. She had a dozen seemingly legitimate passports of her own back at the safehouse in Barcelona, and none of them listed her real name or the fact that she was a high-ranking member of the Basque Liberation Movement.

She turned back to the other woman. “One look at what you’ve filmed and we’ll know you’re lying.”

“Look all you want!” the prisoner said. “Go ahead! I’m telling you, it’s just nature footage! That’s all you’re going to see!”

“They tossed some film into the river when they saw us coming after them,” Enrique stated.

“That’s not true!” the blonde cried. “It wasn’t film!”

“No? What, then?”

The other woman hesitated, then said, “It was just some pot. Some marijuana and a pipe. We know about the laws here, and we didn’t want to be caught with it.”

Rigo was weighing the woman’s words when a young Basque with a wild mane of dark hair poked his head out of the boat’s cabin. “A call for you on the radio,” he told Rigo. “It’s your brother.”

“Which one?”

“Miguel.”

Rigo shared an expectant glance with Golato, then stood. It looked as if she were going to walk away from the prisoner, but suddenly she turned, casually took aim at the woman’s head and fired a round into her face, killing her instantly. As the woman slumped to the deck, Rigo holstered her gun and told Golato, “Once night falls, take them downriver to Sardana and get rid of them, along with the kayak. Make it look like they were robbed by river pirates.”

He nodded. “Done.”

Rigo excused herself and went to the cabin. The young man directed her to the transceiver, then stepped outside so that she could take the call alone.

“Miguel,” she said into the microphone, “I was beginning to worry.”

“It took longer than we’d planned, that’s all,” came the crackly response from the woman’s older brother.

“You got your hands on it, then.”

“Yes,” her brother assured her. “We have the tank.”

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Rosario Blancanales jogged higher up into the foothills surrounding Stony Man Farm. It was his favorite time of day, just past dawn with the sun yet to break through the early-morning clouds. There was a briskness in the air and the valley below him was quiet and tranquil. He’d passed a few small animals—rabbits and chipmunks—and the occasional bird flapped overhead, but otherwise he felt as if he had the winding dirt path to himself.